


Stoker Blake

by DictionaryWrites



Series: Patrician & Clerk [13]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Book: Raising Steam, Canon Related, Complicated Relationships, Cute, Humor, Identity Reveal, M/M, POV Outsider, Secret Relationship, Sleeping Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-04
Updated: 2019-02-04
Packaged: 2019-10-22 06:24:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17657603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites/pseuds/DictionaryWrites
Summary: The man before him is rubbing tiredly at one brown eye, reaching underneath the gold wire of his spectacles to do so, and is visibly doing his best to suppress a yawn. The man, inescapably, is Mr Rufus Drumknott, personal clerk to Lord Vetinari, the Patrician.





	Stoker Blake

On the night train, Moist can’t sleep. Such as it is – most nights, the regular rhythm of the big train on the tracks will lull him into sleep, but not tonight. It’s been a strangely easy couple of days – oh, still ridiculously complicated and odd and irritating as they make their way closer to Überwald, little by little, but not quite complicated _enough_. His mind is wandering, and while he has no doubt that tomorrow (or even tonight!) some great catastrophe will serve to jump up and stop him from getting bored, for now, he’ll just have to _deal_ with it.

He’s terrible at dealing with things.

Adora Belle has told him so.

“Mr Lipwig?” asks a voice behind him, and he glances at the conductor. “Pacing again, eh?”

“I’m afraid so, Mr Gringle,” Moist says, with a charming, albeit tired, smile.

“Well, if you like, you can run an errand for me down at the end of the train,” Gringle says, and Moist claps his hands together in a vague, pleading gesture, making the man smile. Gringle’s a good sort – his brother is a toymaker, and they’ve been working on designing a little miniature of the trains for Crumley’s, back in Ankh-Morpork. “Drop in on Stoker Blake and ask him to pick up his shift an hour early, would you? Stoker Hamilton’s flagging with that pain in his leg.”

“Is he alright?” Moist asks.

“Oh, aye,” Gringle says, with a vague gesture of his hand. “It’s Hamilton’s fault for trying to impress them lasses with his splits – he ruined a pair of trousers, too.”

“In the stokers’ cabin, is he?” Moist asks, already taking a step away.

“No, no,” Gringle says. “He’s right at the end, in one of the lower sleeper cabins. Cabin 15, I think.”

“Why’s he in there?” Moist asks, and Gringle shrugs his shoulders.

“Dunno, sir, he just told me that’s where he’d be.”

“Right,” Moist says, and he turns on his heel to walk down the train. He’d thought, in the beginning, it might be difficult to walk on the train while it’s moving, but that isn’t true at all: the regular movement keeps it steady under his feet, and it’s not even difficult to hop between the compartments anymore, because they have neat folding bits between them, and a little bridge made up… Then again, he misses when it was just a big chunk of iron girding, and you thought, for just a second, that you might fall between…

Gods, he _is_ bored. He misses Adora Belle. She always introduces a bit of danger into his life, when he’s in want.

Most of the people on the train are asleep – even those in the regular cabins are asleep sitting up, leaning against the windows or back against the benches, but he can see a few people staying up late, playing cards. _There’s_ an idea…

He comes to the cabin marked with a brass _15_ on the door, and he knocks against the frosted glass. There’s a short pause, and he doesn’t see any movement in the cabin, behind the door, although there's a light on. He can see the slight flicker of the candle, although it's dim. He knocks again, and this time, he sees a shadow shift in the cabin, coming away from the narrow bed set into the wall.

The door is opened, and Moist stares down at the man in the doorway.

He is a very short man. Moist is a comfortable 6’2”, but _this_ man is very short indeed, not even reaching 5’5”, Moist would guess; his mousy-brown hair is soft and curly with sleep, in a muss about his head[1], and his glasses are slightly askew where they’ve been hurriedly pulled onto his face; he wears a pair of pyjamas that are a little bit too big for him, the cuffs and hems bunching a little around his wrists and ankles, but they’re beautifully made, of a comfortable black linen with silver thread embossing the edges of the cuffs, the collar, and the edges of the shirt, as well as around the pocket on the breast. This pocket, Moist notices, contains a little notebook and a pencil.

The man before him is rubbing tiredly at one brown eye, reaching underneath the gold wire of his spectacles to do so, and is visibly doing his best to suppress a yawn. The man is also, inescapably, Mr Rufus Drumknott, personal clerk to Lord Vetinari, the Patrician.

“Mr Drumknott?” Moist asks. He has never imagined Rufus Drumknott sleeping before. Equally, he has never imagined Rufus Drumknott eating, or using the facilities, or, he notes in a sort of absent-minded way, even _breathing_. The secretary is ordinarily so put-together as to almost be a ghost in the Patrician’s office, and the reason for this is that he’s so perfectly in sync with Vetinari himself: neither of them really come across as _human_ , most of the time. They’re meant to be something else, something separate and unimpeachable, something _higher_.

“Mr _Lipwig_?” Drumknott asks. This _higher_ , unimpeachable, perfectly-pressed little man looks up at him sleepily, and scarcely suppresses the unmistakable _whine_ in his voice. “What do you want?”

How old is he? Moist realizes he’s never actually wondered before, despite having known Drumknott for years[2], and had always just brushed him off as _young_ , but looking at him like this, he sees that Drumknott _isn’t_ that young. He must be nearly thirty, but the glasses and his clerk’s robe, much like the ill-fitting pyjamas, tend to distract from that and make him look younger than he is at a glance.

“I, er, I—”

“Mr Lipwig, I would thank you, as is your nature, to be _fugitive_ ,” Drumknott grumbles. There are a few things to be noted in this. Drumknott, sleepy and irritable, is not holding back as he snaps at Lipwig, although his tone remains quiet and polite; Drumknott rubs once again at his eye, and is missing his usual composure; that’s a _pun_. He just made a _pun_ , at Moist, in the middle of the night!

“Sorry, Mr Drumknott, I was looking for Stoker Blake,” Moist says. “Is he across the hall?”

For a long second, Drumknott stares up at him, his dark eyes full of somnolent fury. Then, he reaches up for the notebook in his pocket, and Moist watches him, expecting him to check the notebook for a cabin number, but instead, with an astonishingly quick pitch that would make Drumknott an unexpected terror in rounders, he launches the notebook across the cabin, behind the frosted glass wall and toward the bed. Moist hears a dull thud, followed by a low laugh, and he feels a sort of heat rise on the back of his neck.

Drumknott.

Rufus Drumknott, unexpected train enthusiast, little sleepy man, personal clerk to the _Patrician_ … And having been in bed – in one of those narrow, _tight_ cell beds – with one of the stokers. One of the _infamous_ stokers.

Moist doesn’t know what his face is doing. He hopes it looks quite neutral.

“Is it Stoker Hamilton’s leg?” Drumknott asks.

“Yes,” Moist says, powerless but to go along with the tides of this new happenstance. Drumknott! Drumknott, in _bed_ , with someone, with a man, with a _stoker_ – with one of Moist’s stokers, on the night train! Mr Drumknott, losing his temper, and throwing his _notebook_!

“I did tell him,” Drumknott mutters, and now he _does_ yawn, hiding it against his palm. Are those pyjamas even _his_? What does the Patrician think about this? Is this a business trip? Why—?

“Mr Gringle asks if he could start his shift an hour earlier,” Moist says, in order to stop his mouth from saying something more inappropriate.

“Aidan?” Drumknott asks, looking to his left.

“That’s fine,” comes Blake’s voice, low and thick with an accent rather like Adora Belle’s. Dolly Sisters… “Thanks much, Mr Lipwig.”

“Right,” Moist says. He then asks, as casually as he can, “Got a business trip up the line, Mr Drumknott?”

Drumknott stares at him for a long second, and then he drags the door shut. Moist watches the shadow behind the frosted glass disappear back into the bed set into the wall, and then he hears low laughter, followed by a grunt, and silence. Mr Drumknott, who sleeps, and eats, and breathes, and probably has sex with train stokers, and who just _hit_ the stoker laughing at him.

_Drumknott!_

It isn’t danger, no, but it’s certainly _something_. Gods, but this’ll be something to tell Adora Belle.

 **♔** **☩** **♔** **☩** **♔** **☩** **♔**

“You! You were Stoker Blake! That’s impossible!”

As the Patrician talks, it is impossible not to imagine Rufus Drumknott in pyjamas too big for him, rudely awakened and glaring up at Moist on the night train, some weeks back. “I assure you of this, Mister Lipwig, I am a man of many talents and you should hope never to encounter some of them. Compared with them, Stoker Blake was a mere babe in arms.”

“What,” Moist asks, weakly, thinking of the Patrician and his _many talents_ in bed with his personal clerk, on the night train, and trying to focus on keeping himself upright, “fighting with shovels?”

 

[1] This hair is ordinarily so neatly controlled, coiffed back with an unscented hair cream produced by Mr Quiver & Co.

[2] As far as one can be said to “know” Lord Vetinari’s shadow, who you occasionally pilfer pencils from, and who generally looks at you as if you’re a very badly-behaved local moggy that keeps trying to steal from the pantry.

**Author's Note:**

> Hit me up [on Dreamwidth](https://dictionarywrites.dreamwidth.org/2287.html). Requests always open.
> 
> I run a [Discworld Comm](https://onthedisc.dreamwidth.org/), and there's also [a Discord right here.](https://discord.gg/b8Z3ThH)


End file.
